Spoiler Alert: The movie that wins best picture at the Academy Awards tonight will not be the best film produced in 2014. Much is uncertain about who will win, but this we know for sure. The coronation of this years' winner will simply mark the dramatic climax of a three-plus-hour live-television extravaganza (give or take a few hours if you tune in to watch the stars arrive) — a production designed to do little more than make you feel good about Hollywood, and to inspire you to see more of its movies.

But it will still be interesting. The Academy Awards tell us a lot about Hollywood — and about ourselves. The big studios are our supplicants. They want nothing more than to figure out what we want, and to provide it.

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For all the chatter about Hollywood's politics, or its agenda, as seen through the controversies surrounding "Selma" or "American Sniper," in practice the industry is indifferent to content and void of purpose — other than to produce pictures that open big and rake in huge grosses. And the Oscars are a night when the world's greatest mass entertainers try to convince you . . . to like them.

Don't get me wrong. In the movies today there are hardworking and enormously talented people, on both sides of the camera, who threw themselves wholeheartedly into making films that they believed in. Some of them will walk home with statues in hand, and, even though we don't know them — not at all-we should feel free to cheer.

If, as seems very likely, Julienne Moore wins best actress for "Still Alice," it will be well-deserved and long overdue. Odds-on favorites for Best Picture, "Birdman" and "Boyhood," are original, ambitious and aesthetically coherent entertainments that reflect what the movies — that astonishing, intoxicating art form- can accomplish at their best. The same can be said of "The Grand Budapest Hotel." It's not to every taste, but it offers a distinct vision and has something to say. And "Selma" showed the extraordinary power of the movies to achieve what was thought impossible: It made people feel sorry for Lyndon Johnson.

But look past the artistry and pageantry and the Academy Awards, a long and expensive advertisement for the industry, are there to make you feel good about Hollywood, to make Hollywood feel good about itself, and, most of all, to be good for business.

That is, good for the movie business in general, and, more pointedly, for the bottom line of some movies in particular. The ballots cast by 6,000 Academy members determine who will win, and, like most voters, they are the target of vigorous campaigns.

These ruthless and aggressive operations have become so rabid — and presumably, so effective in determining the outcome of which picture is best — that the Academy's official "campaign regulations" come to seven single-spaced pages. (Contacting Academy members by telephone, or "any tactic" that explicitly refers to competitors "is expressly forbidden.")

Working within those rules, or not, studios push their products, hard, for the Academy's attention. One purpose of these campaigns is to massage the egos and promote the personal brands of pampered celebrities. But they are also grasping at the big brass ring: the box-office bump that comes with Oscar's glow, which can be especially important for movies that fall into the category of award-bait.

It is an inconvenient truth, and a source of some discomfort, that for the most part, big bucks don't come from the "prestige pictures." They are loss leaders. The lights in tinsel-town are kept burning by the latest installments of the Hobbit, X-Men, and Captain America series, and what might be called literary adaptations (the "Twilight" movies hauled in over $3 billion; Hollywood's inner goddess thinks "Fifty Shades" can do even better).

The prestige of the Oscars, then, gives the deal-makers a chance to pat themselves on the back and take a day of respite from haggling over the contract minutiae of "Taken 3," "Hot Tub Time Machine 2" or the latest reboot of the "Spiderman" franchise (Spidey seems to need new boots every five years).

The tension between art and commerce plagues Hollywood because the costs of production are very high. This has always been a problem, but never more so than today. Even though technology has led to some remarkable efficiencies, it is simply much more expensive to make a studio movie than it is to record a song, paint a picture or publish a book.

And the movies are a massive business, one increasingly dependent on international markets, with enormous and soaring costs of production and promotion.

All this skin in the game fosters, above all, risk aversion and timidity — thus the relentless search for and reliance upon "tent pole" enterprises that translate well and spawn sequels. But these action and effects-heavy efforts, brimming with expensive, bankable stars, only reinforce the cycle of ever-increasing cost, leaving studio heads ever more terrified of offending any audience.

Singers, painters and novelists have more freedom to take risks. Commercial movies seek out the safest shores.

No wonder what's playing at the multiplex often feels like an imitation game.

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Hollywood comes to the awards as the steward of a compromised art. Its long history of test-marketing its product — and even changing endings to fit the response cards — is well known. Today's pictures are further skewed by anxiety about how films will play abroad.

And so, "The Dark Knight" took an extended and plot-irrelevant detour to Hong-Kong, genuflecting before the now-vital Asian market (the film made tons of money everywhere, but like so many American blockbusters these days, most of it overseas).

Courage on screen (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Hollywood's worries about foreign markets reached absurd proportions in 2012 with the remake of "Red Dawn," the ludicrous Reagan-era fantasy of a Russian invasion of America. The homage was originally to feature instead a still-preposterous but more modern-day appropriate conquest by China — until it occurred to some accountant that the picture might lose its Chinese audience.

And so, with a digital air-brush here and a re-dubbing of dialogue there, the dangerous foreign power that would threaten us in our homes became . . . North Korea.

DROPCAP This sort of chronic caution may have an uncommonly humorous flair, but it is consistent with American film history. Hollywood loves bravery — onscreen. Behind the scenes, it is quick to cower.

In the 1930s, afraid of bluenose boycotts and meddling state legislatures, it preempted all troubles with a strict self-censorship code that sanitized the screen. In the mid-1940s, when everyone went to the movies, "The Best Years of Our Lives" caught the uneasy national postwar mood, and took home the Oscar for the best film of 1946.

The following year, the modestly provocative "Gentleman's Agreement" got the nod. But soon enough Congressman Richard Nixon and Sen. Joseph McCarthy told Hollywood to sit down and shut up, and it promptly did, imposing a blacklist on suspected subversives and avoiding controversial content — or anything that might be interpreted as such — at all costs.

It would be 20 years before Hollywood would think of celebrating films that might be called "daring," knighting instead the comforts of "An American in Paris," "Around the World in Eighty Days," and "The Sound of Music" as its Best Pictures.

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Briefly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, part of Hollywood was half-dangerous. "Midnight Cowboy" won best picture in 1970, and much of America gasped — or at least perennial master of ceremonies Bob Hope did, editorializing from the stage that movies ought to show "a real respect for law and order and the things that made this country great."

He need not have been so worried; Hollywood's flirtation with cutting-edge fare did not last long. At the 1977 ceremonies, "Network" and "Taxi Driver" lost to "Rocky," the story of a simple, decent underdog triumphing against all odds.

Hollywood may indeed be full of liberal libertines. But the movies are, above all, big business, and however liberal its underwriters may be in thought, they are conservative in action. They are not leading the audience, they are following it — usually chasing it.

Best Picture nominee "The Imitation Game," for example, is not nudging society with its homosexual hero; it is reflecting the social changes all around us. By way of contrast, in the original drafts of "Bonnie and Clyde," Clyde was bisexual. That, then, was a non-starter, and the script was changed. Then and now, Hollywood put a premium on not offending mass sensibilities.

More or less, we know what Hollywood likes. That is, we know what Hollywood thinks are the most basic things that you like, and wants you to walk out of the theater humming along with: Nazis are evil, racism is bad, moms are great, dads can be reconciled with, and there is nothing better than overcoming overwhelming adversity at impossible odds, with the possible exception of true, unbreakable, romantic love. Good movies with big stars that check some of these boxes tend to do very well at Oscar time.

So, why won't the best picture win? Because there is no such thing as "Best Picture." And even if there were, it's unlikely the Academy would spot it.

Consider: According to Oscar, the "Best Picture" made in 1989 was "Driving Miss Daisy." As for genuinely challenging works of art like "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Do the Right Thing," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Sex, Lies and Videotape" - they weren't even nominated.

Best Picture is advertising copy. Don't buy it.

But watch the show. There are great movies worth celebrating; there always have been, and there always will be.

Kirshner, a professor of government at Cornell, is author of "Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society and the Seventies Film in America."